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Vidyo Inc. has secured $22.5 million in Series D funding as the market for video conferencing expands into new applications. One of its most successful verticals so far is health care, where its systems are being used for remote patient monitoring, telemedicine and training. It’s also having success in education and government, but those are just the beginning, the company says.

“Vidyo has seemingly been on a roll lately: The startup got a lot of attention last week for its Vidyo Panorama product, which gives enterprises a cheaper way to offer video conferencing without having to install huge and expensive telepresence rooms. But its enterprise-facing offering is only one part of the story: With a set of APIs for unified communications and multiplatform video chat, Vidyo is also enabling third parties to build their own video conferencing applications.” [Click on the article’s headline to read the full article]

“Vidyo’s founder, Ofer Shapiro, says his company’s not just competing on price. With $74 million in venture backing, Vidyo has developed a telepresence system that will allow up to 20 screens instead of the usual three- or four-screen solution. The company also says it uses bandwidth more efficiently and doesn’t require any special, costly networks to be deployed. But, bottom line, price is Vidyo’s big differentiator. ‘They [Cisco] are selling Rolls-Royces and Lamborghinis,” says Shapiro, Vidyo’s founder and CEO. “We’re selling the Hondas and Acuras.’” [Click on the headline to read more]

“Vidyo has launched VidyoPanorama, a personal telepresence systems offering 1080p at 60fps up to 20 screens, at what the company claims is 10 per cent of the cost of current telepresence systems. The system is being specifically aimed at resellers, who have put off by the high cost of traditional telepresence systems…” [Click on the headline to read the full article]

A New Jersey start-up wants to take telepresence, a high-end video-conferencing service typically too pricey for all but the largest companies, and make it affordable for smaller businesses. […] The company is introducing a nine-screen video system. The nine screens will give corporate clients the option of including more branches in their telepresence meetings. (Click on the headline to read the full article)

“Cisco Systems (Nasdaq: CSCO) and Polycom (Nasdaq: PLCM) may be heading for some trouble. According to Morgan Keegan, Cisco and Polycom may see stiff competition from relatively small Hackensack, NJ-based Vidyo in the high-definition video conferencing arena. […] [Simon Leopold] contends: ‘We suspect Vidyo’s potential disruption to traditional players in this industry is in its patents surrounding SVC (8 granted, many more pending). If traditional vendors are not able to replicate the performance of Vidyo’s SVC without infringing their patents, then Vidyo could potentially extract license revenue from the other vendors, or could build a successful video conferencing product company by keeping the best performing SVC technology for Vidyo branded products.’ Vidyo will also have a “sweet-spot” in desktop and mobile versions of the technology, where Vidyo is ‘superior to other vendors,’ Leopold said.”

So-called room-based video conferencing systems, where high-definition feeds are displayed in life-size format between participants, may be at risk, writes Morgan Keegan analyst Tavis McCourt in a note to clients this afternoon. […] The real sweet spot for Vidyo, McCourt thinks, are desktop and mobile versions of the technology, where the quality of SVC is ‘just plain superior to other vendors,’ in his opinion.

That inexpensive software and more flexible connection is enabling the company to gain early ground in the video conferencing market as well as open up live video to host applications that weren’t possible because of the high price of enterprise video conferencing systems and the low quality of other Internet-based systems.

Vidyo Panorama works with off-the-shelf hardware and allows users to create their own applications on top of the video conferencing system. The upfront investment is 90 percent lower than the usual telepresence system and ongoing expenses are also dramatically lower, Shapiro said. At the same time, the system offers much better quality and multi-person connectivity than low-cost alternatives such as Skype. The system works better than others because, rather than transcode video from one form to another, Vidyo adapts to the video format at hand.

Vidyo’s contention is that many existing telepresence systems are both costly to deploy and manage, and also limited in the number of participants who can appear on screen during a given conference and inflexible in terms of the types of screens they can support. In many systems, for example, people “disappear” from the conference every time the number of remote cameras in a telepresence system exceeds the number of available screens, Vidyo says.

The move puts Vidyo, which has been selling desktop and room systems, in even more direct competition with the likes of Cisco and Polycom by moving them into the high-end telepresence service — with a major twist. Vidyo’s pricing is about 10 percent of the existing players’ highest-end systems — the ones that use special furniture and lighting to create immersive telepresence experience — and its approach is more about connecting many different endpoints than reproducing the impact of a face-to-face executive session.

Videoconferencing firm Vidyo has launched an immersive telepresence product that it claims is significantly cheaper than those from key rivals such as Cisco and Polycom, as the market continues to heat up.

The big story here isn’t that Vidyo has launched a multi-screen system that costs a fraction of what competitive multi-screen telepresence environments cost. The big story is that Vidyo’s low-cost back-end video network infrastructure that supports high definition 1080p, 60fps multi-site video calls is now supporting multi-screen telepresence calls at a fraction of the TCO of competitive systems.

Will this approach be the new approach to telepresence in the market? Is this approach doomed to fail? Remember that very few of us thought an iPad would be a useful item before getting one. Vidyo has done a great job of making me think about the rules of multi-screen video systems and I suspect that they will have the same impact on many others as well.

Two of Vidyo’s internationally renowned technologists, co-founder and chief scientist, Dr. Alexandros Eleftheriadis and Dr. Stephan Wenger, CTO of VidyoCast (News – Alert), the company’s broadcast division, were among the four co-authors of the “RTP payload format for Scalable Video Coding” specification that was published as RFC 6190 on May 7, 2011.

Many smaller companies in the industry said Microsoft’s massive bet on Skype would boost take-up of videoconferencing and create new opportunities for them. “Skype takes the scariness out of videoconferencing,” said Ashish Gupta, marketing chief at venture-backed Vidyo, whose software platform is used by HP and Google (GOOG.O) among others.

When a physician uses videoconferencing in a patient-to-doctor consultation, he or she wants to clearly see and hear the person at the other end of the screen. To support that effort, American Well has selected technology from Vidyo that it believes will bolster its online telehealth offering.

The Vatican City State has selected and deployed VidyoConferencing technology to enhance communication within the Church. The Vidyo platform will be used for communications between employees and clergy in central offices such as the Governatorate and the Roman Curia, and in other offices in all continents, TMC Net reports.

After initially previewing support for mobile computing devices last year, Vidyo today announced availability of its high-definition videoconferencing software for smartphones and tablet PC devices.

Video conferencing technology company Vidyo is enhancing its platform with support for Apple’s just released iPad 2, Motorola’s XOOM tablet and Atrix smartphone. The platform utilizes the company’s VidyoTechnology SDK,  Read More